The Internet Gives a Human Touch to Digital-Era R&B on ‘Hive Mind’

Haziness, leisure and organic imprecision are the gifts of the Internet, the R&B band that emerged from the Odd Future collective. In its own deceptively nonchalant way, the group has been defying the hard-edge, quantized norms of digital pop and hip-hop; it prefers insinuation and seduction to brittle transparency. The slow grooves of the songs on its fourth album, “Hive Mind,” seem to bubble up from quiet, clandestine late-night jam sessions, blurred with dust and smoke while sometimes revealing stray noises, fugitive instruments and little hidden pockets of reverb and distortion.

The Internet started as a duo of producers and songwriters: Sydney Bennett, who was Odd Future’s sound engineer and called herself Syd tha Kid (now simply Syd), and the keyboardist Matthew Martin, who called himself Matt Martians. Their cluttered but exhilarating 2011 debut, “Purple Naked Ladies,” indulged a multitude of whimsical, psychedelic-soul impulses in the studio. The next two albums, “Feel Good” and “Ego Death,” solidified their touring group into a band — with Steve Lacy on guitar, Patrick Paige II on bass and Christopher Smith on drums — and cleared away some (but happily not all) of the musical tangents. There’s still no telling when an Internet song will melt down partway through and transform itself into an entirely different tune.

The jazzy chromatic chords and slinky bass lines of Stevie Wonder’s 1970s solo masterpieces infuse the Internet’s music, along with the bedroom whispers of Janet Jackson and Prince, the smooth funk of the Commodores and Earth, Wind & Fire, and the phased, fuzzed guitar tones of Ernie Isley. So do hip-hop drums and a willingness to tuck all sorts of things into the surreal background of a track: horns, vocal beatboxing, voice mail messages.

The Internet imperceptibly melds hand-played parts with loops and samples; whether or not it actually is, the music feels analog. Even where the drums are looped, the bass lines often drag and pull against the beat, breaking away from vamps to improvise and loosen things up; vocals arrive wherever they want, teasing expectations. Songs might just end with the sound of a tape slowing down, or its simulation.

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The Internet’s fourth album is “Hive Mind.”Credit

The Internet perfected its mixture of studio mischief and song structure on “Ego Death” in 2015. For most of that album, Syd — the band’s main songwriter — sang about romances with women, inflected by ambition, celebrity and digital communication; there was also a glimpse of a troubled outside world in “Penthouse Cloud,” which addressed police shootings with pain and prayer. Then, between Internet albums, band members vented their more eccentric ideas on solo recordings.

“Hive Mind” falls ever so slightly short of “Ego Death,” though it’s still superb. The songs are a little more generalized, less specific; the music feels just a little more deliberate, though it’s still full of surprises. The album opens with “Come Together,” a distant 21st-century echo of Marvin Gaye’s “What’s Going On,” with thoughts about divisiveness and uncertainty over a jumpy bass line, wondering “What we gon’ do”; then voices gather out of nowhere to insist, “They gon’ get us to come together.” In “Roll (Burbank Funk),” which follows it, Mr. Lacy urges, “Listen to your heart/What’s it sayin’?,” but what matters just as much is the suavely strutting groove.

Then come the amorous chronicles. In “Stay the Night,” “Come Over,” and “Hold On,” Syd gently negotiates her trysts: “Not saying I’m a pro/But you could learn from me,” she coos in “Hold On.” In “Mood,” Syd reveals the tactical thinking during a date: “Right where I want you/I check my posture.” And in “Wanna Be,” she ponders how to move from friendship to romance, as creamy vocal harmonies — part Chi-Lites, part Beach Boys — hint at blissful possibilities.

But Syd is no pushover. In “Look What U Started,” a skulking bass line carries withering accusations: “You blame it on your problems but it’s no excuse/You can’t keep playing innocent — I know the truth.” Meanwhile, in “La Di Da,” she casually brushes off a guy: “Face it, I’m out of your league,” she sings, adding, “Sorry that I’m so blasé.” Saving face, he insists, “I just came to dance, catch a groove,” and the song provides a snappy one, peppered with wah-wah guitar and Latin percussion.

Rhythm consummates the album’s seductions, with grooves that are sneakily unconventional. “Stay the Night,” a bossa nova-tinged invitation, divides a slow eight beats into 3+3+2, making it seem to hesitate and then skip ahead. The drumbeat in a mocking kiss-off, “Bravo,” starts out like a basic stomp with two loud beats and two soft ones, but the bass line and vocal phrases each start on different beats, keeping things off-balance.

The album is filled with near-subliminal details like those: furtive guitar licks, cymbals tapping quietly against the main beat, squirmy little synthesizer lines. There’s plenty of room for Syd (and occasionally Mr. Lacy) to sing their stories, while behind them there’s not a digital vacuum, but the stealthy, vital, unpredictable stuff of life.

The Internet “Hive Mind” (Columbia)

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page C2 of the New York edition with the headline: Seductive Rhythms, Sneakily Entwined. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe